serving tequila and whiskey on the rocks is handing out totally different stuff after hurricane sandy. we'll at the you what's on the list at the bottom of the hour. "the next list" with sanjay gupta starts right now. this right here in this spot, this forest on this branch with this moss is where i feel most at home. my enthusiasm in spreading this is because like eye religious evangelist, if you know you have the truth, you want to make sure everybody has it. >> it's not for the faint of heart, climbing up in these big trees. she is a boon for science and she is a boon for science education. >> i jokingly refer to her as st. malini. >> st. malini. that's just one nickname. add science evangelist and climber of the treetops as well. when you meet her for the first

time, you'll immediately know why she met these titles. >> one minute with malini, you can see why she's out in the forest. >> she's climbed trees for a living for three decades with a seemingly endless supply of energy, enthusiasm and a tad of quirky. malini is constantly on the go. she's racing to discover all she can about every tree on the planet. >> i have felt this increasing sense of urgency to understand what's up here, to document what's up here because we're losing it. i feel like i just can't stop. i can't stop. and i have to work harder to make a new program, to reach a new audience. >> malini is reaching new audiences, bringing her love of nature and science to congregations, kids and a group that just might come as a surprise. >> it's not just sitting in a cell being stagnant. >> people come up to me and say,

my god, i had no idea that prisoners in prisons could be like this. i would like to bring what i have been privileged to understand to everybody else out there, even if they never get to put a rope up a tree and climb it themselves. >> malini brings that same passion to everyone, including cnn's poppy harlow, who accepted the challenge to join this force of nature in her own environment. >> welcome to "the next list." i'm dr. sanjay gupta. >> we are in the quinel rain forest, part of the olympic park in the olympic western peninsula in washington park. this is considered the best example of rain forests. >> and this is your laboratory? >> yeah, you could consider this my lap.

this is where i carry out my field research, it's where i come to ask questions of the forest. there are two places i feel most at home in terms of my work. one is in costa rica where i spent a lot of time, and this is the other place. what is similar to both of them is the sense of what's going on up in the canopy, who are these plants and what are they doing in the forest and how can i find out about what their role is in the forest as a whole? that's what i want to know. my name is malini marconi and i'm a science educator, a mother and a nature evangelist. the first time i climbed this tree using climbing gear, i thought, oh, my gosh. i'm going up this rope. why didn't anybody tell me about this earlier? i'm so excited about this world that could be mine. i could just enter into it. >> reporter: what did you think is the most important discovery you've made being up here? >> the fact that these maple

trees and many other trees actually put out roots from their own branches and trunks that go underneath these mats of mo mosses. this soil has been basically made by these mosses and these ferns. as they die and decompose, they create the soil. so essentially it's a nutrient source like fertilizer for your garden, but they're all here on these branches and trees way up from the floor, and some of these are actually capable of pushing out roots from their own trunks. nobody knew that before. nobody knew that trees could put out roots into their own canopy and sort of suck nutrients out of their own tenets. so when i published that, i think people thought, wow, there's more going on in the canopy that no one ever knew about. >> you have these trees lined up because they started on the same piece of solid wood, and the last piece, the moss, what role does it play?

we were clueless. but malini found out. i'm john preston. i'm a park ranger at olympic national park. her study has moved to many branches. it's all that important discovery to these small, little roles and people are pursuing that for their scientific careers. >> my goal is to bring what i'm seeing right here in this canopy to other scientists and more importantly to other people around the world. i think ultimately that's the only way we're going to save our planet, we're going to save ourselves and our connection to the planet. >> coming up, unlikely research partners. malini inspires hardened criminals to go green.

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we have a variety of offenders who commit a variety of crimes. we have 400 offenders probably in for murder, a quarter of a population sex offenders and about a third of our population is in for violent assault. every morning i wake up and it's a shock to find, you know, i'm still here, but then i have this duty, this job, that makes it sufferable. >> hi, i'm toby. i'm an inmate at the correctional center. >> anywhere the gardens are, i can go. my name is james and i work with the christmas projects. >> when i first approached the prison administrators, they were really skeptical and suspicious of why would i scientist want to

come in and do research. >> this is something different in this prison system that's different than any other prisons in the state, but they want to soak up the information. they took up a lot of the research themselves and made the plant project a priority. >> very easily they understood how fantastic it is to be able to nurture plants or read an article and do some kind of research. >> incarcerated individuals and staff that work in prisons, the work that our inmate technicians do on our conservation projects in terms of raising prairie plants, in terms of endangered frogs and butterflies is not just in the rearing of these organisms but in understanding how to rear these organisms and also in understanding their ecology and life history.

>> i sow a lot of seeds, plant the garden out here, onions, vegetables and stuff, watering. i look forward to sunny days so i can work outside, and when it's not sunny, we have the greenhouses to work in. it's very gratifying. >> my life before prison had virtually nothing to do with horticulture. i always kept a small garden, i'm not a stranger to it, but on this level and with this depth of knowledge creating the soil and learning the latin names for all the plants and, you know, seeing the sheer numbers going out and making a huge difference in the environment that we're trying to effect, it's amazing. >> it's really a paradigm shifting, a whole new way to look at incarceration as an institution. my name is dennis aubry. i'm a canopy researcher.

she's turned this into a constellation of prisons. >> she's a genius. a genius is not just a measure of intellect, but a measure of creativity. >> it's probably saved us $100,000 a year, and then our food compost program probably saves another $80,000 a year. >> reporter: why do prisoners need to learn about sustainability and composting and recycling? why bring that to them? >> i think in the case of many people, and especially many inmates who have acted irresponsibly in one way or another, a lot of it has been about not knowing what the consequences of actions are on a person, violence or whatever. so offering the opportunity to prisoners to say, you know, you need to hoe this garden, you need to water it carefully, well, that gives them a sense of responsibility, it gives them some skills when they get back out. >> working with malini has been

a very good aspect of my prison sentence, if there is any such thing i could attribute that to her. >> it makes me think i'm doing something, i'm accomplishing something. i'm -- how do i explain it? i don't look at fences. i don't see the fence ns anymor. when i'm out here, they're not here. how does this thing work? oh, i like it! [ garth ] sven's small business earns 2% cash back on every purchase, every day! woo-hoo!!! so that's ten security gators, right? put them on my spark card! why settle for less? testing hot tar... great businesses deserve the most rewards! [ male announcer ] the spark business card from capital one. choose unlimited rewards with 2% cash back or double miles on every purchase, every day! what's in your wallet? here's your invoice. anyone have occasional constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating? yeah. one phillips' colon health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues with three strains of good bacteria.

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so when i come home, one of my wonderful duties is to attend to these mosses that i am desperately trying to keep alive. when i first came here, salt lake city was very dry. it's sort of the antithesis of the moist, rainy pacific where i

lived for 20 years. and there was something in me that almost wanted to reconstruct what i feel is so important in my life. w >> reporter: why should people care what's up there, what's in the canopy? >> i think you should want to get acquaint with the organisms that live up there. there is much more thought on the practical aspects, for instance, medicinal drugs. ten years ago, i was involved in a program that was looking at anti-cancer, anti-aids compounds that could come from natural substances, plants, animals, marine life and so forth. so they sent me to the canopy to look for cancer aids with these anti-virus substances. to i climbed trees and brought these back. they're still in the process of refining them, extracting them and so forth, but about 25% of our prescription drugs actually come from plants.

>> reporter: so this love of trees, again, i'm not exactly sure where it came from, i just know i have it. i think it started from childhood. my dad was a scientist from hindu, india, and my mother was an orthodox jew. there was a lot of cross-living with a hindu and a jew and an american. and living with a family that was essentially an indian family where girls are not valued as highly as boys are, i think that it was important to me to have an identity. and that, i guess, was one way of establishing it, of saying, this is my thing. this connection i have with trees is mine, and for whatever reason, when i would come home from school, i would throw my backpack in the house and go climb a tree and learn that, in fact, there is a whole area of

academia of life, of understanding nature and communicating it with people. when i first started out doing canopy research, i was one of a very small number. literally a handful of people who were doing canopy research. it wasn't a field of study. i happened to meet a guy named don terry who was pioneering techniques of using mountain-climbing equipment to get up into the forest canopy. he taught me how to shoot lines way crossbow. he taught me to you to use the cross lines to get up there. this is a caster, what i use to get the line up in the tree to begin with. yes! then i felt like, okay, i can conquer this world. i know i can go into the canopy now and discover what i need to discover. so when i came back to my major professor and i said, i have discovered what i know i need to

do. i have to find out about these canopy plants that are living up there. and my major professor said, you know, malini, with all the questions on the forest floor, why do you have to get up into the treetops? keep your feet on the ground. and i was discouraged but not that discouraged. and i said, no, i know there is stuff going on. so i got a grant myself, and it allowed me to go do a comparison of the canopy-dwelling plants in the coasta rican treetops. he ma it was published in magazines, and it became a very big deal. it made people say, this is real science. maybe she's on to something here. >> she was on to something. when we return, malini leaves tre the treetops for an even higher

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so these wonderful hanging chairs, what are they about in the lab of professional biology here? to me it was important to always have with me some reminder, some important, significant thing about what i'm about, which is understanding trees in forest canopies. >> we looked for the right person for years. i'm michael hardman. i'm the interim senior vice president here at the university of utah and dean of the college of education. one of the major, major reasons we were looking for a center for science and math education to take us into new places was to connect the university to the community, to outreach work, to

be able to work with schools, work with communities. one minute with malini, and she can take you, she can transport you from being in a learning situation in an isolated setting to being out in the forest. >> for basketball courts, there is a special kind of tree that is used for basketball courts. it's called maple, sugar maple. very hard wood, very flexible, and it is perfect for bouncing a basketball. so what we did today was really the first time i think anybody has done this because i never really made the connection between sports and science before i came here to utah. there is all this energy and enthusiasm and knowledge for sports here. can i somehow connect the science to it? so what we did today was really bring it to the kids and say, let's take a couple hours to talk about and show you guys how cool sports is, how cool science is, and how very cool they are when you put them together. >> inside we have orientations, and outside we don't have that many. >> i like it because you can see

things you've never seen before. >> reporter: when did you decide i need to teach this to others and not this classroom? >> it was sort of this growing sense going on in society where conservation groups were saying, what is going on with our forest habitats? i began seeing in my own children and their friends that they were not outside running around climbing trees. they weren't connecting. to me it seemed like, well, i don't know what i can do that's going to be major. i'm not going to change the world. i'm not a politician. and it seemed to me with my skills as a scientist, my desire to communicate, i think all of those started to contribute to thinking about how do i communicate beyond science. >> are you succeeding? >> little by little, i believe i'm making progress. i believe when i look into the eyes of a prisoner who hasn't been on the outside for 20 years and he is nurturing a small

seedling that we gave him to raise for reforestation on the outside, i believe i've made progress that way. when i sit in an episcopal church and i talk about spirit walt. >> first, how did we participate in the region of spirituality? second, how might the awareness of this participation lead us to be a better steward of our trees? i see people shaking his or her head, and that's when they come up afterwards and say, would you be able to map the trees in my yard as well? i think that's progress. >> so these obviously were not part of the original churchyard. >> i found her to be a bridge builder, and she was reaching out to a community that was saying, hmm, i'm not sure about you, and by the time she was done, they a dord her. i'm susan soleil. i'm the director of interfaith power and light. malini does stick out a little bit, and i think that's one of the reasons why it works well.

i -- it's fun to have someone that comes with the cultural diversity that malini comes with, and the knowledge and passion, i think, ignites everyone. >> if i could stir them up and say, look, your religious texts say trees are important. i'm not telling you that, your bible is telling you that, your koran is telling you that, your buddhist ins krrks rrks ircript telling you that. you'll see that trees are something to be cared for based on just the nature of your religion. whether it's talking one at a time about trees and spirituali spirituality, whatever it takes, it's my dream to reconnect the world to how important nature is for us. if we can do that, i think what

follows is that we will take better care of this. and if i can die as i hope, trapped to a tree branch in the tropical cloud forest letting minute rents sort of flow into the trees, knowing that i helped that cause, then i will die happy. and maybe that sounds corny, but i actually really believe that. >> malini isn't nearly finished with her work. she's lending her expertise and her voice to an npr radio series on trees. malini has even broke sbun the fashion industry. she's working on a line of what she calls botannically correct clothing. they include tags with information about the tree pattern being worn. she's an explorer, a professor, a mentor and now a designer. but perhaps malini's greatest invention is her ability to introduce trees